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November 27, 2006
Obese Moonbats Learn How to Throw Their Weight Around
Posted by Dave Blount at November 27, 2006 7:42 PM
The victim studies movement that is steadily replacing anything resembling a useful education on college campuses has found a new area to expand: fat studies.
Fat studies is an exercise in unmitigated moonbattery, as an approving New York Times makes clear:
Nestled within the humanities and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political consequences of being fat. [...]
Proponents of fat studies see it as the sister subject — and it is most often women promoting the study, many of whom are lesbian activists — to women's studies, queer studies, disability studies and ethnic studies. In many of its permutations, then, it is the study of a people its supporters believe are victims of prejudice, stereotypes and oppression by mainstream society.
Research topics include how fat people are marginalized, how they are insensitively blamed for their own gluttony and sloth, how doctors exaggerate the health risks of obesity, etc.
Ivory tower moonbats are going through all the usual motions, expressing skepticism about the "war on obesity" and discussing "weightism" in law school tort classes. The anthology "Fat Studies Reader" collects scholarly research on the weighty subject of being fat. One chapter is entitled, "Jiggle in My Walk: The Iconic Power of the Big Butt in American Pop Culture."
A 29-year-old named Stefanie Snider is planning to write a dissertation for the University of Southern California on, in the Times' words, "the intersection of queer and fat identities in the United States in the 20th century." Size 18 burlesque dancer Cookie Woolner, who at age 32 is also still a graduate student, wrote her undergraduate thesis at Hampshire College on "positive representations of fat women in fanzines and underground media."
Meanwhile, tuition skyrockets, college students are found wanting in basic skills, and taxpayers are bled dry on behalf of institutions of supposedly higher learning.
Even some professors are developing a dim awareness of how far they have wandered into the realm of self-parody. Wonders University of Colorado social psychologist Joseph B. Juhasz:
Certainly we have not reached a point where we can do away with queer studies or race studies or women's studies. But where do you draw the line? Is there going to be a department of man-boy-love studies? Do we need polygamy studies? At which point do you say, enough already?
We should have started saying it at least 40 years ago.
Hat tip: PirateBallerina
